Jake Kerridge is hugely impressed by a 1,000-page multimedia thriller
nominated for the Man Booker Prize.

Martin Amis once said of Elmore Leonard that “all his thrillers are Pardoner’s Tales, in which Death roams the land disguised as money”.

The same is essentially true of The Kills, Richard House’s Man Booker-longlisted thriller, although in a novel that is just over a thousand pages long there is room for some variation on the theme. But whatever disguise he adopts, Death is kept constantly busy throughout the course of this book: The Kills has a higher mortality rate than Hamlet.

The MacGuffin at the heart is a missing $53 million, the fruits of a shady contractor’s cunning scheme to embezzle funds from an American building venture in the Iraqi desert. House’s ambitious project is to show how this crime is the epicentre of a shock wave of violent deaths across half the globe.

His interest in what drives somebody to commit murder is only half the story, or perhaps less than half: as one character says, “wickedness is not as interesting as you might hope”. What seems to fascinate House most is what causes somebody to become a victim, whether of murder or some hideous accident; what it is about their personality that sends them to their destruction as inexorably as the Titanic ploughed towards the iceberg. One is reminded of D H Lawrence’s view that “it takes two people to make a murder: a murderer and a murderee. And a murderee is a man who is murderable.”

For all its bulk The Kills proves easily digestible, as it is not so much a novel as four shortish, tangentially connected novels in one. The first, Sutler, concerns the flight of the man whom the crafty peculator has set up to be the chief suspect and the unfortunate consequences for a male student who develops a crush on the fugitive.

The second mini-novel, The Massive, is a prequel to the first. The most overtly political of the four and the most interesting, it tackles the topical issue of workmen alleging that they have been poisoned by contaminants while working at the Iraqi burn pits where all the rubbish from building projects is destroyed.

We know at the start that these men will die of horrific cancers within a few months of each other, so the story is about how their employers and the American government collude in bringing about their deaths, and about what makes these men take on this dangerous work — why they become murderees.

The third volume, The Kill, set mostly in Naples, is something of a change in tone. If I tell you that at one point a character says, “perhaps someone will write a book about making a film about a story that is taken from this book which is taken from a real-life story that was copied from a story in a book”, you will guess that it sees House at his most Paul-Auster-ishly metafictional. The final mini-novel, The Hit, featuring a professional killer in Cyprus who starts to question his own motives for doing what he does, is the most moving, and ties up a small percentage of the loose ends.

But my summaries do not do justice to a hugely convoluted work in which dozens of characters execute a dance that has obviously been minutely choreographed, although one that to the reader increasingly seems to appear dizzyingly random. Motives get more shadowy and the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred; ambiguity becomes the key note.

The House method of storytelling is to create brilliantly realised characters, focus on them for a brief, intense period, and then abandon them, often leaving their fates obscure. What on earth happens to Lila, the barely pubescent prostitute who carries around a toy panda that, thanks to the vagaries of the plot, is stuffed full of thousands of dollars? If ever an author could be charged with criminal negligence of the characters he has created, it’s House.

Much has been made of the fact that this is a multimedia novel, with a couple of hours’ worth of extra video content available (your device may not support this content but then your lap may not support the hardback — nothing about The Kills is easy. It is all available on the Picador website, however). It mostly consists of beautiful films of impressive scenery over which actors intone accounts of epiphanic moments in the characters’ early lives or speak in sententious riddles. It will not answer any of your questions.

But as to the book itself, it is well worth ejecting five or six conventional thrillers from your holiday luggage and devoting yourself to The Kills for a few days. Like all the best thrillers, it takes you on a hell of a ride, even if by the end you’re not quite sure where exactly it is you’ve arrived at.